My Friend Marco

My friend Marco died like his heroes.

It was a terrible waste — as is the death of any young person. Marco was talented and sweet, and he made us all laugh a lot… and he deserved to live long enough to realise that most of his heroes were douchebags.

Marco loved the past. He had a haircut like Keith Richards and all his talk was about Hendrix, Joplin, The Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol. He was stuck in a teenager’s daydream about the sixties.

I always find it weird when I meet people who are completely aping the past. It happens a lot and I think it’s kind of a waste of your youth. Don’t get me wrong — I like all those artists too, but I don’t want to copy them. That’s been and gone.

It’s a point that I guess some people miss — that at the time The Velvets weren’t making music that sounded like something someone made 50 years before, they weren’t dressing like people did in a past era, they were doing something new.

Marco was a talented artist and musician. He would probably have grown out of the not-in-costume Ziggy garb and the scuzzy retro rock if he’d lived long enough. He had enough about him to become a real innovator.

On the other extreme to that, I have friends who are really smart and talented and can tell you anything about any house DJ or producer but will just be like “Uh… What? Who?” if you mention anything that happened over 20 years ago, or now but outside of our scene. That’s as bad and kind of the same.

I liked that I could talk about stuff with Marco that wasn’t just who’s playing at Wire next week.

With Marco it was mainly pre-1980. Probably the most modern person me and Marco ever discussed was Jean Michel Basquiat.

I was buzzin when I found out that Marco was into Basquiat’s band, Gray.

Gray made really cool, ambient, cut-up kind of music, which was very forward thinking for its time.

Marco hated Julian Schnabel’s biopic, Basquiat, because of course he did.

At the time, I kind of agreed with him — although I enjoyed the film — because it isn’t historically accurate …but now I see that I, too, was missing the point.

It’s like when people slagged off The Get Down and they didn’t stop and consider that it’s a Baz Luhrmann production and not a documentary.

And Marco, of all people, who revelled in the myth that self destruction is glamorous and beautiful, was the last person who should have suddenly been hung up on the blurring of facts with fiction.

But I will never be able to finish that conversation with him and tell him I think he was wrong.

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